(Headline USA) President Joe Biden will resurrect his proposed billionaires’ tax during his State of the Union address before Congress on Tuesday, according to the White House.
Biden first proposed a minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires in March of last year, but ultimately agreed to toss the proposal during negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act. The proposal would have set a minimum 20% tax on incomes of more than $100 million per year. This tax would have applied to “total income,” including regular earnings and unrealized gains.
Biden plans to push for the tax again during his annual address.
“President Biden is a capitalist and believes that anyone should be able to become a millionaire or a billionaire. He also believes that it is wrong for America to have a tax code that results in America’s wealthiest households paying a lower tax rate than working families,” the administration said.
The White House went on to claim that billionaires pay only an 8% tax rate. But economists have long disputed that number, since it is based on a calculation of rates that count unrealized capital gains as income.
When pressed on whether Biden would address these concerns, outgoing director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese told reporters that Biden wants “this economic conversation to focus on how we can keep reducing costs for the American people.”
“And doing things like cutting taxes for the very wealthiest people in the country and increasing the deficit as a result of that not only are bad economic policy, but they don’t speak in any way to that core issue,” he said.
Deese also claimed the U.S. is economy is still strong and stable despite recent lay-offs across the tech sector and stubbornly high inflation rates.
“We’ve seen inflation come down, we’ve seen the labor market remain resilient. And we find ourselves today in an economy where we have real resilience here,” Deese said. The goal now is to “redouble our efforts to actually implement a policy agenda that we know and we have seen has really helped to bring this progress along.”
